Lessons From The Apprentice (6.5 – Los Angeles)

The Candidates

Kinetic: Muna, Kristine, Derek, Marisa, Angela, Jenn, Heidi, Aimee

Arrow: Nicole, Frank, Michelle, James, Carey, Tim, Martin, Aaron, Stefanie, Surya

Prelude:

Aaron talks about being on Trump’s side of the table in the board room. He didn’t say much the whole time and Trump chastised him for it. He said he didn’t want to interrupt and was afraid to say anything that would put himself in jeopardy. Not the sign of a great leader!

The Task:

The teams will be working with Sue Bee honey. The team that makes the most money after bottling and selling the honey wins. This task is more reminiscent of Fear Factor than The Apprentice. The wow factor of this task is that they have to bottle it from the bee’s nests and run the production line. Oh, and there is a little bit of marketing involved as well.

Kinetic Corp:

Aimee leads the team as PM. While most of the Kinetic team is harvesting their honey she and Jen work on the marketing aspects. When the team returns they were somewhat disappointed that Aimee and Jen hadn’t even come up with a name. They had expected much more to be done already.

On the day of sale, Kinetic had no idea on pricing or posters. They are terribly disorganized. The team is busy unpacking honey and hanging a cheesy banner while Aimee stands around and gets coffee for the team.

Some of the team tries to make bulk sales store to store while other team members try to sell in the store. Derek puts on a bee harvester suite and tries to generate some buzz in the store. The team found an Olympic gold medalists to help them sell the honey.

Arrow Corp:

Arrow Corp. goes to work determining how best to sell the product. Surya leads the marketing aspects which seems to go above the heads of the other team members. They discuss packaging, labels, unique selling proposition, etc. Some of the other team members “just want to sell.”

Arrow has a buy one get one free deal. They are also providing honey samples with fruit. Survey starts talking about actually bottling the honey which seems to turn people off. Aaron, as project manager is doing more following than leading.

What I Might Have Done:

I would like to be able to see more of the marketing preparations from the teams. The gold medalist seemed to show up out of nowhere, who arranged that? This season focuses too much on the boardroom and not enough on the planning and execution of the tasks.

With that said, it’s hard to determine what I would do different since there wasn’t too much shown about what the teams actually did do. The gold medalist was a great tactic and so was the bee harvester outfit. Both of those could probably have been used more to the team’s advantage.

Having the sampling table with fruit was a good idea but I think both teams could have done more to generate buzz on the outside of the store to bring people in. More marketing, more signs, more “noise” about what they were doing. Neither seemed to have that.

The result:

Arrow sold 217 bottles for a total of $717.14. Kinetic sold 345 for a total of $836.58. Kinetic gets to move back in the boardroom while Arrow moves out for yet another night. Aimee gets to be PM again, despite her obvious lack of leadership skills.

The team feels that Aaron is too laid back. He needs to be more aggressive to win. Aaron blames Surya because he just wanted to talk about marketing “theory and statistics”. Surya is already blaming the others for throwing him under the bus… if he gets fired.

The Boardroom:

Surya says they had a solid plan but it was the project manager who lacked leadership. Trump talked to Aaron about his quietness in the boardroom. Aaron already has a notch against him. Aaron points to Surya as the failure because he was in charge of marketing.

Trump points out that the team love Surya until they lost and now they all blame him. Aaron said he wanted to ask Trump what was expected of him on the boardroom. The team seems almost evenly split between Surya and Aaron to go home.

Aaron chooses to bring both Surya and Nicole back to the boardroom with him, though he readily admits that Nicole should not be fired, even though they sold absolutely nothing from the bulk sales efforts.

Aaron points out that Surya cannot make a decision. He proved that when Trump asked him which team was more talented. Nicole puts the blame on Aaron due to lack of planning. Sean points out the lack of signage and Aaron says that’s Surya’s fault.

Trump says Aaron was weak on sales and weak in the boardroom the previous week. Trump fires Aaron for lack of leadership.

Who’s Not Apprentice Material? Frank, James. This week I add Aimee to the list. She seems pretty clueless when it comes to leadership. She did seem to do well in the boardroom, perhaps too well so she may be removed from this list later. After his pre and post boardroom performance, I’m also going to add Surya to this list. He’s a whiner!

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t whine. Even when you think you’ve been wronged, get over it and get past it.
• Planning is key to marketing. A bad marketing plan will almost always lead to bad marketing results. Plan, plan, plan.
• Leading means making decisions. Don’t wait for the team’s input if a decision needs to be made now. Instead, make the decision now.

What would you have done?